Conan the Barbarian: G.O.A.T.

I never thought I could ever like a movie better than I liked the original "Conan the Barbarian".  That movie had everything.  It had Arnold Schwarzenegger being awesome with a wig on.

It had James Earl Jones with great hair fighting Arnold.

And when Arnold's lover dies, she begs him to let her breathe her last breath into his mouth.  Which would be bizarre if it weren't hilarious.

So I came in thinking that this new Conan didn't have any chance to match the old one.  I was wrong.

The first thing I noticed in the first scene of the movie was what an interesting group Conan's tribe is.  They're having some kind of war, and Ron Perlman (who's apparently the Rabbi/Chief/President of their club) is walking around stabbing everyone with his sword.  But his wife is standing in the middle of the village, wearing war gear... and obviously about 14 months pregnant.  Shockingly, she's dying not from being stabbed by someone who's 1) male and 2) not carrying a fetus, but is dying of pregnant (yeah, apparently "pregnant" was a common cause of death in wherever Conan was from).  So Ron Perlman waddled over, cut the kid out of her womb, and asked her what she wanted to name him.  In what must have been a delirious fit, she decided her barbarian-child would be named "Conan".  Then she died.  I'm guessing her second choice name was "Letterman".

So then we learn a little bit about the village.  Ron Perlman, by virtue of being named Ron Perlman, is obviously a very Jewish barbarian.  Conan, by virtue of not being able to talk properly (he mostly made lots of grunting noises and sneered a lot) and having a rather dark complexion, is obviously a very not Jewish barbarian.  Which invites the obvious conclusion that Conan's barbarian-warrior mother was sheathing more swords than she let on, but that's an issue best left for another day.  In this village, the movie establishes that everyone does one of three things: forge swords, race around the mountain, and worship the hawk.  Possibly all the above, but definitely not more than 2 at the same time.

The next thing the movie establishes is that, for the most part, the village sucks at all three.  Somehow, Colonel Quaritch (Noah Lang's dad) from Avatar rolls up, except this time instead of an Army haircut and a Mech Warrior, he brings Freddy Krueger.  Except she's a woman, so I guess it's Freda Krueger... Either way, they proceed to beat up on the village, jack their swords, and pour hot steel all over Ron Perlman.  Which I'm 98% sure is a hate crime, so you know they'll get theirs in the end.  But for whatever reason, Quaritch decides he likes Conan.  Probably because he's got a fat friend, and Conan cuts the fat friend's nose off.  Quaritch knows cutting his fat friend's nose off is hilarious, so he lets Conan of the hook and doesn't kill him.  But at this point, Conan doesn't have a Dad, and everyone else in the village is dead, so he's gotta figure out what to do with himself.

Needless to say, like any orphaned barbarian, Conan gets a full-time job.  From what I could tell, this job consisted of rolling large rocks down hills for the purpose of breaking topless women out of cages in which they were enslaved.  They then proceeded to drink beer and arm wrestle while ignoring the topless women completely.  So for awhile, Conan is having a great time with his life of freeing naked women and getting wasted.  But then his buddy with no nose showed up, and things got real.  And by that I mean Conan decided being MLK of topless women wasn't for him anymore.  So he went looking for Quaritch.

Now, at this point, a bunch of stuff happened, but the basic point is that Quaritch was after a particular girl, who for various reasons that aren't really clear was hanging out in a monastery with a bunch of other pretty girls and an old man who kind of looked like Raiden from Mortal Kombat.

But subtlety isn't Quaritch's style, so instead of rolling up and grabbing his woman from the monastery, he ran over the wall with his super-Jeep.  Oops.  So of course she ran away and found Conan.  Actually "found" Conan is kinda strong... What really happened was Conan told her she wasn't allowed to talk or have opinions because she was a woman.  Apparently, not keeping topless woman caged made Conan Susan B. Anthony in the barbarian world, but allowing them to talk was still preposterous.  Needless to say, she doesn't appreciate Conan's misogyny and lets him know about it vocally.  Just kidding-- he stuffs a cloth in her mouth, which leads her to fall in love with Conan and sleep with him.  That decision also forced her to forfeit her "Pure Blood" title.  But that's neither here nor there.  Instead of making Conan get her breakfast after giving it up to him, she went to pick mushrooms.  And got kidnapped by Freda Krueger.  Whoops.

The rest of the movie primarily involves Conan bailing his woman out of jail and killing Quaritch.  Needless to say, it's awesome.  At this point, I'm not actually sure what the next movie I'm going to see is, but when I do, I'll be sure to write another review.  And it'll be just as unproductive and useless as this one was.

Citizen Kane. The Godfather. Cowboys and Aliens.

For the first time since I started work this summer, I went to the movies at midnight on a Thursday night to see the opening of a newly released movie.  There have been a good number of really good movies this summer-- Harry Potter was disappointing, but the new X-Men was very good, I really enjoyed Super 8, and Horrible Bosses was hilarious.  But last night, right before my last day of work, I went to see Cowboys and Aliens.  Why? Because Cowboys and Aliens are awesome.  Individually, they're awesome.  Combined, they're... more awesome than if you add them together.  If Cowboys have 10 awesome points, and Aliens have another 10 awesome points, Cowboys AND Aliens have 25 awesome points.

So I guess the first place to start is with some plot points.  There are some SPOILERS HERE just in case someone would get upset about it.  But really, this is Cowboys and Aliens, not an M. Night Shyamalan movie.  There are a lot of cowboys and aliens and explosions, just like you see in the previews, plus some things that are also awesome but aren't advertised in the trailer (Native Americans!).  So the plot: James Bond wakes up in the desert a few years after the Civil War in the Wild Wild West with a metal bracelet strapped to his arm.  He doesn't remember anything (besides how to speak English).  He rolls up to town, where Han Solo has a son who is being a giant prick.  Also, his son is the preacher who Daniel Day-Lewis lays out to dry in There Will Be Blood, except now he's taller and has the kind of facial hair semi-pubescent 13-year olds who don't know how to shave grow.  James Bond proceeds to repeatedly kick him in the nuts for the next half of the movie.  It's awesome. 

When he gets to town, it's full of posters of James Bond, who is apparently wanted for everything.  So the sheriff and his boys come after him and want to send him away.  They also want to send away Han's son because, again, no one likes 26-year-old pricks who can't grow real facial hair.  The only other person interested in James Bond is Olivia Wilde.  You don't really have any clue who she is, what she does, or why the baddest woman in 19th century America (or 20th century America.  Or of all time, really) is chasing James Bond around like a hound dog.  Especially when he spends the first half of the movie telling her to bounce.  I spent the first half of the movie thinking they were both aliens, her because, even though Bond beat up on all of the town's police, she cold-cocked him with one punch, and him because he had without a doubt the most beautiful woman in America chasing him around, but acted like he just wasn't interested at all.  It might've made sense if he was gay, but flashbacks made clear that he wasn't.  But, just as Bond and Han's useless prick son are about to get carted away, the aliens show up.  They shoot a few people, snatch a few others (including Han's son and the bartender's mail-order bride) and bolt.  In the process we figure out that Bond's metal bracelet is actually a super-gat that can take out the alien spaceships.  At which point I'm definitely kind of thinking he's a different kind of alien.  But the rest of the movie is more or less spent figuring out who he is, who Olivia Wilde is, and why she's so desperate to kick it with him.

We would be figuring out what the aliens want, but (and this is the best part), it's really not that complicated at all.  They're desperate for gold.  Yeah, the big bad scary aliens are a bunch of Glenn Becks who scour the universe snatching everyone's gold because alien Ben Bernanke is apparently printing too much alien money for the aliens' good.  Long story short, there's a bunch of fighting (where the cowboys really don't bring much to the table, bu the Native Americans do serious work), and everything ends.

Long story short, it's a cinematic masterpiece because: 1) Cowboys, 2) Aliens, 3) Native Americans, 4-25) Olivia Wilde.